The Rockefeller Years (1902-1917) and Beyond

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John M. Heffron

The Rise of the South in American Thought and Education: The Rockefeller Years (1902-1917), and Beyond documents the rise—both real and imaginary—of the South in American thought and education at the close of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. The South’s main appeal to industrial statesmen like the Rockefellers, their philanthropic work a focus of the book, was what it symbolized to them at a time when traditional elites in both regions were facing a frightening new array of social and political conditions, much of them pursuant to the country’s very real industrial "takeoff." Those who presided over the nation’s economy understood the need for orderly change that would balance the demands (and dislocations) of modernization with America’s most cherished traditions. They viewed the reactionary South and its nationalization as an important counterweight to centrifugal tendencies in the North, including the rapid growth of cities and their "Romanization" by a flood tide of property less, uneducated, and discontented southern and eastern European immigrants. The traditional emphasis in the South on vocational education (the Christian ethic of work as redemption, not the Republican one of free labor), country life and living, racial segregation, and the centrality of nature study as a source of both science and religion, added up to a coherent vision that responded to "undesirable" economic and social change in the urban North. The survival of Southern cultural traditions, as antiquated as they were, posed no threat to the plans of corporate progressives; indeed, as the book argues, it facilitated them, and nowhere more so than in the field of education. Modern educators wanting to put into historical context relations of class, race, and ethnicity as they persist in today’s schools will find much here to inform them, putting to rest, for example, false distinctions in the history of school reform between a liberal-progressive North and a conservative and reactionary South. This book will also appeal to a popular audience of Americans curious to understand the illiberal foundations of the modern liberal state.

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Chapters From the Twelfth Century to the Twenty-First

Peter C. Jupp and Hilary J. Grainger

For the past twenty years, Scottish death culture has emerged as a focus of scholars drawn from a wide variety of disciplines. Death comes to us all but too often we treat it as a private or personal matter. The former taboo about death is slowly lifting and contemporary research is playing an increasing part. Accordingly, the fifteen essays gathered in this book probe the multi-facetted role of death in Scottish history and culture. They explore personal fears of death, anxieties about Predestination, prayers for the dead and the appeal of Spiritualism. They analyse the public face of death in law, economics and medicine: changes in capital punishment, funeral poverty, the teaching of anatomy and prevention of stillbirths. Within the worlds of religion and ritual, they consider the making of saints, burial practice following the Scottish Reformation and the tradition of keening within the Gáidhealtachd. With an Introduction by Professor Jane Dawson, these essays by specialists in the field not only highlight the richness of the primary sources for studying death in Scotland but reveal how death studies identify key features of Scottish life and society across ten centuries.

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Edited by
Elize Bisanz

The volume focuses on the application of Peirce’s semeiotic as a methodological tool to establish a common field for interdisciplinary research. Contributors from the fields of biology, architecture, logic, esthetics and neuroscience, among others, work on diverse research problems, unified by the idea of transcending the dyadic limitations of disciplinary restrictions and applying Peirce’s triadic method, and the structure and process of sign relations of the particular problem that has to be solved. The result is an invigorating example of methodological plasticity wherein the reader acquires an understanding of scientific observation within the complex universe of semeiosis relations.

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Edited by
Texas Tech University

Peirce Studies is a peer-reviewed monographic series edited by members of the Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism at Texas Tech University. It seeks to advance scientific research relating to the works and influence of Charles Sanders Peirce (Member, U.S. National Academy of Sciences [Logic of Science]), a scientific theorist and pioneer of methodologies that enable interdisciplinary research. Volumes may be focused upon Peirce’s writings or involve studies that link the spirit of his methods with contemporary problems and projects in any relevant discipline. Works may be expressed in any recognized scholarly language.

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Publication History:

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Annemie Leemans

The topic of this book is practical knowledge in early modern Europe, interpreted widely as recipes containing art procedures or medical panaceas between 1400 and 1700. In this book, the 1) origin or creation, 2) transmission or dissemination, and 3) use or consumption are key subjects for understanding the place of practical knowledge in early modern European society. After a historiographical and theoretical approach, this book applies Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome metaphor to art technological literature. The first part ends with a study about medical practitioners and mediators who disseminate practical knowledge through the printing press. The second part of the book is entirely dedicated to the booklet A Very Proper Treatise (1573), using a microhistory approach to study it.

Chao Liu

This is the first work in English to explore Manchukuo literature in its entirety. It provides comprehensive, in-depth, and thought-provoking research by placing the literary history of Manchukuo from 1937 to 1941 in specific cultural lineages and socio-political contexts and focusing on four major literary groups of that period—the Manshū rōmanha, the Sakubun writers, the Yiwenzhi intellectuals, and the Wenxuan School—to illuminate its underlying intellectual dynamics. As it turns out, Manchukuo literature notably featured multiplicity, ambiguity, and self-reflexivity, which enabled it to transcend the dichotomy of romanticism and realism and that of the colonizers and the colonized. Not unlike a coordinate system, it took modernity and national identity as its horizontal and vertical axes. The Manshū rōmanha and the Sakubun writers respectively adopted an anti-modern or a modernist perspective and unanimously headed towards the intellectual stance of denying their own national identity and merging into the indigenous society of the colony; in comparison, Manchurian intellectuals, as epitomized by the Yiwenzhi School and the Wenxuan School, started from the same purpose of promoting national consciousness, but at last embarked on a bifurcated path to either modernization or cultural regression. Moreover, although the literary writings of these four groups differed much from each other in topics, stylistic features, and narrative modes, they all showed a deep concern for the sufferings of the Manchurian people brought by colonialism, coincidentally directed their criticism or sarcasm against the colonial rule, and thereupon endowed Manchukuo literature with a keynote of darkness.

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Focus on Politeness

Edited by
Thomas Szende and George Alao

The L2 speaker is able to function in the target culture only when s/he is able to understand, anticipate and produce the choices that the said society makes. Being polite therefore means: knowing how to draw on the conventions of a society, taking into account the expectations of an interlocutor regarding social relations at any given point, and is based on the appropriate language register to the communication situation; being able to balance standard and non-standard features and to adjust one’s speech by moving it towards more or less familiarity, or formality. The learner therefore needs to be aware of the pragmatic flexibility of speakers – native and experts – who move from one register to another and juggle between respect and caution, first degree meaning and irony, exuberance and excess, with difference in levels, nature and degrees of politeness.

This volume contains contributions whose theoretical reflections, field work experiences and authentic data from diverse African, Asian and European languages, literatures and cultures as well as a variety of corpora shed new light on politeness as a central phenomenon in pragmatics, and on what is at stake when teaching or learning the subject. It also opens up a conceptual dialogue with a whole range of domains likely to enrich the debate: sociolinguistics, literature, translation studies, semiotics, cultural anthropology, social psychology, etc.

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The Life and Death of Kurdish Leader Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou

Carol Prunhuber

This book follows the life and brutal assassination of Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, the Iranian Kurdish leader who was killed while negotiating a supposed peace accord for his people with Iranian government emissaries in Vienna, Austria 1989. Countless elements remain unresolved in this political assassination. The culpability of the Iranian government is clearly spelled out, yet jurisdiction has never been passed on the perpetrators.

Combining historical and political analysis with journalistic testimony, this story depicts real events reconstructed through political documents and speeches, police reports, taped material, letters, interviews, and the author’s own first-hand knowledge of Ghassemlou. His destiny brought him to significant events of the twentieth century that laid the groundwork for his future role: the Soviet occupation of northeast Kurdistan in 1941; the coup d’état organized by the CIA and the British secret services against the Iranian Prime Minister Mossadeq in 1953 and the installment of the Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran; the end of the Spring of Prague with the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet tanks in 1968; the beginnings of a certain autonomy in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1970 and the ensuing negotiations between the Kurdish leader, Mustapha Barzani and Saddam Hussein. Preeminent in this list is the determined rebellion of the Iranian Kurds against Khomeini in 1979.